Thomas Kelly, Engineer `Father Of The Lunar Module'

March 28, 2002|The New York Times

Thomas J. Kelly, the engineer who led the team that designed and built the spacecraft that landed Apollo astronauts on the moon, died on Saturday at his home in Cutchogue, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 72.

The cause was respiratory failure related to his six-year battle with pulmonary fibrosis, his family said.

Mr. Kelly's work earned him the designation "father of the lunar module" from NASA.

When President John F. Kennedy charged the nation to land astronauts on the moon before the end of the 1960s, Mr. Kelly rallied a team of engineers at what was then Grumman Aircraft Corp. of Bethpage, N.Y., to build a vehicle to take a crew to the moon and let them blast off again for the journey back to Earth.

Mr. Kelly helped develop the lunar orbit rendezvous concept that made the moon landings possible with the rocket power available at the time. The Grumman team came up with the idea of a two-stage spacecraft that would take two astronauts to the moon's surface.

The effort culminated in a lunar excursion module, or LEM, designated Eagle, which landed Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. on the moon on July 20, 1969.

"Nobody at Grumman who worked on the lunar module will ever forget it," Mr. Kelly said in a 1999 interview. "We all knew that we were part of a majestic endeavor, and that we were making history happen."

Mr. Kelly wrote about his experiences in the book Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module.